Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli, where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi's prisons.
The announcement came as the Metropolitan police and the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute individual MI5 or MI6 agents following lengthy investigations into allegations of British complicity in the torture of terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The new investigation is to focus on Abdul Hakim Belhaj, a military commander of forces that opposed Gaddafi's rule, and Sami al-Saadi, who lodged complaints with the police last November after the chance discovery of a cache of classified documents in an abandoned Libyan government office laid bare the role MI6 played in their rendition.
Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 mounted in co-operation with Gaddafi's intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa.
Belhaj was detained in Bangkok after an MI6 tip-off and allegedly tortured by US agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he was imprisoned for several years and tortured.
But:
British spies escaped immediate criminal charges over torture complicity Thursday, but the country's top prosecutor ordered a new investigation into claims that intelligence shared with Moammar Gadhafi's regime led to the torture or rendition of Libyans.
Prosecutors have been investigating claims of mistreatment by detainees who were eventually sent to the United States prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. Most of the torture allegations come from terror suspects who were either initially held in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or sent to other countries such as Morocco for interrogation.